Peter Coffee

This month has brought forth a horde of rather obvious one-year-later stories, looking back at the Northeasts massive electrical blackout of August 2003. Many of those stories share an interesting blind spot: They look at traditional issues of power-grid technology and management, while apparently forgetting the initial (and rather hysterical) suspicions that Blaster worm infections […]

“There must be millions of people,” wrote columnist Robert Benchley about 70 years ago, “who are no more equipped than I am to guide a motor vehicle through any more of an emergency than a sudden light breeze. The logical ending to the whole situation is for all the automobiles in the world to pile […]

I wrote last week about the failure of conventional security thinking in dealing with information security threats. As I said in that column, you cant control traffic in information assets by merely inspecting messages—their contents are too easy to disguise. Even if you do hold on to data, you cant be sure that what you […]

I remember a poster in a college dorm room, back in the previous century, that said “I finally got it all together, but then I forgot where I put it.” Information systems have historically been good at putting things together, and in their latest Web services incarnations theyve even gotten good at making things appear […]

Digital tools make and take away perfect copies of information, leaving no tracks behind. They can also be used, though, to distort information in ways hard to detect. Sensitive knowledge easily crosses our borders, while once-trustworthy data such as photographs become no more credible than the person who presents them. We dont know what were […]

A system may fail without telling the user why, which is quite bad enough; worse still, it may fail invisibly, returning inaccurate results with no hint that anything has gone wrong. Two trends in application development make failure warnings more important than ever. First, application developers are consuming a growing number of remote resources, created […]

Bad things happen when ideal IT concepts bump into the realities of imperfect hardware. This time, Im talking about the slow-motion train wreck of BPL (broadband over power lines), a basically bad idea thats now the subject of a newly launched IEEE standard process. With lots of people wanting its benefits and few people understanding […]

If we dont make substantial gains in our practices of preserving, finding, and reusing code, we wont keep pace with the opportunities presented by continuing hardware improvement. More devices to do things, and more kinds of connection to share things, will be unfinished stories of what-might-have-been if they require vast new coding efforts—testing, deploying, and […]

When an application depends on third-party data, a developer cant expect to redesign those data structures to meet the applications needs. GPS data, for example, is one size fits all. If you want to use GPS-based location data, youll either be relying on someone elses firmware, or interpreting the Global Positioning System data structures yourself: […]

When users and managers misunderstand what technology can do, IT architects wind up with two problems. The first arises when people overestimate the state of the art and expect more than any IT department can deliver. The second arises when people dont realize how much a technology has improved, or how quickly its still improving, […]

Is enterprise IT management becoming the realm of the contracts administrator rather than the technologist? For the last several years, Ive been thinking IT looks more like corporate telecommunications management, with its focus on service relationships rather than product acquisitions and deployments. Now, however, Im having second thoughts: This may be a seriously incomplete perspective […]

Its great for users, although its traumatic for vendors, when information-based devices evolve from fixed-function appliances into open application platforms. Flexibility always wins in the long run, but an open platform needs to offer its users new applications all the time and also needs to give those users updates to the platform itself at critical […]